How To Punch A Hater In The Face
Haters are everywhere.
I hear about them from bloggers I admire and I fear the day a hater shows up in my comments.
I hear about them from my kids and it leaps to a whole new level. My heart breaks. I want to punch them in the face.
Haters are the black cloud in a clear blue sky. They will bitch and whine about anything. Everything.
“I wanted a yellow Ferrari, not a red one. You suck.”
They hide behind clever pseudonyms and fake facebook accounts; they strike and slither away into deep, dark holes.
They are no one.
The Ugly Truth
I’m a glass half full of scorpions kind of girl. Keeping a positive attitude? Tough stuff. Especially around the kids, and especially in my writing, I work at the positive tone.
But inside, the voice that mocks me is mine.
I am my own worst hater.
I am the one asking, “Who are you to change the world?”
I am the one thinking, “You pretend you’re good, but you’re not. The people reading and encouraging you? They’re just really nice people. But they lie.”
It’s hard to ignore that hater.
The Beautiful Reality
I’m not alone.
Ask a room full of dreamers about their inner voices? Surprise! They all say the same things.
Our inner haters aren’t very creative. So why give them power?
If the haters in our heads all use the same talking points–if each one of us has that in common–we can band together against them.
Together, we can do what alone is too hard. Too scary. Too intimidating.
We can punch our inner haters in the face.
A tribe full of dreamers is an amazing, uplifting thing. Let’s banish the haters in our own heads. Let’s punch them in the face and get on with chasing our dreams.
What does your inner hater tell you? Leave a comment…
*Photo Credit Andrius Petrucenia (Creative Commons)
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About Christine
I am a writer, a project manager, and a corporate refugee with a heart for orphans around the world. My two daughters were adopted from Ukraine at ages 12 and 14. I post about writing, chasing dreams, and making a difference in the world, and sometimes I share fun snippets of fiction in-progress.
I’ll go first.
My inner hater tells me that I’m not good enough, that every mistake I make proves that I’m an idiot, and that if I were to finish a book, I would never be able to sell more than 5 copies of it.
Our inner haters are twins, Christine. He/She also says that I have nothing original to say and that I’m wasting my time (and yours) pretending otherwise.
I’m hopping over from Tribewriters. Enjoying the journey there and excited to meet kindred spirits!
Welcome to the River, Susan…Great to have you here. I can assure you that you DO have something original and special to say (but yes, they’re twins. Mine tries to tell me that too).
Even if you talk about topics that others have talked about (because in that sense, there’s nothing *truly* new), no one else on the face of the earth can bring your unique blend of experience, perspective, or opinion to it. You are special and your voice is important!
Mine says I’m not good enough at anything and a big faker. Some day everyone will know I’m just an awful person. I’ve had the same hater a really long time and some days he’s louder than others. He even lays low for periods of time then ambushes me when I least expect it. He sucks.
If you’re a faker, you are super-good at it. And no one can fake it that well for that long, so I think your hater is a liar too. And he sucks. So….bye-bye Linda’s faker-hater! I’ll hide in the bushes and ambush him before he ambushes you.
Niles!!! I wanna punch mine in the face!!! That comment about how the encouragers are just really nice people made me chuckle. I said the exact same thing to Neill after church last Sunday. You word stuff so well and it is encouraging. Im ready to go kick bootie and take names today…..or perhaps I will just punch my hater in the face!
You are so cute! Trust me, anyone saying nice things to you is being totally truthful!
Great article!
My hater is a little different. It says, “You can’t even identify your dream and passion. You probably don’t even have a passion.”
I’m going to put the hater down and find my dream to chase.
That’s awesome, Dean. I know you can find it!
There’s a great quote in Quitter (have you read that??) that says “No one ever told me, ‘I’m a pharmacist, but I have no idea what I want to be. Absolutely zero idea really. Never had a dream, never had a desire, never had something that made me feel alive. I am a blank canvas of misery in the pharmacy where I work.’…We might not be able to say ‘I want to become a CPA and open my own business on 10th Street in Cleveland, Ohio, in March of 2014,’ but for the most part we’ve had a glimpse of our dream job.” (Jon Acuff, Quitter, pp 29-30)
I agree the hard part is recovering it from the mire–pulling it out and cleaning off the mud. I want to help.
Mine says “Stop writing. You’re ignoring your kids. You should be playing with them 24/7 or you don’t really love them. Anyway, you suck and no one cares, so you may as well keep playing hide and seek with your kids, and just plain-old “Hide” with your readers.”
Nice intro to 2013, by the way Christine! Hit fear in the groin, then kick it when it’s down. Screw punching it in the face!
Oooh, the “time spent with your dream is time stolen from your family” lie. Talk about a guilt trip…except it’s still a lie. A really good co-dependent one.
Don’t hide. Your story is too important.
Mine’s been quite vocal lately…
Oh no! I don’t want to wait another month to punch it for you in person.
an amazing post, christine! read it this morning but didn’t have a chance to comment until now.
my inner hater? he says, “you’re not as good a writer as those other writers you admire. you’ll never be able to create like they do.” that’s pretty much the overarching message most of the time, with a smattering of “you suck,” here and there.
i also hear that same refrain you mention from time to time, “The people reading and encouraging you? They’re just really nice people. But they lie.”
and with the holidays, i haven’t been as diligent and consistent with writing as i want to be. i find the longer i’m away from my dream, the louder and more jovial the inner hater gets.
i’ll show him….
I saw a quote from Hemingway recently “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
If one of the greatest authors of the last century threw away 99% of what he wrote, I think we’re all being too hard on ourselves.
Great post Christine! 😀 My inner hater always tells me that I’m not good enough, that my story sucks, that no one will take me seriously since I never went to college, etc. It can be quite viscous. But one thing I learned is that no matter how far up the ladder you are in your success, the inner-hater will always show it’s ugly face and put you down. I’ve learned to just deal with it, and whenever it decides to speak, I just say “Well, we’ll see about that. Now shut up.”
Love that answer…I can learn from your awesomeness!
Mi inner hater tells me all the time that if I was a real writer I would be able to write something everyday. I would be more diligent with my blog and have more writing contacts to share this journey with. When I write something that I think turns out pretty good I look at it like a punch in It’s face.Take that! Then the next day when I can’t find anything to write about it laughs at me and says, “told ya so.” Nice to know I’m not alone. Oh, and the ,”they’re just being kind, they lie,” thing, yup, I think that all the time too.
My, not Mi. Stupid predictive text.
and if that’s the worst thing autocorrect does to you, consider yourself lucky!
Amen!!
I think a lot of us have more writing days than we want start out with “I really have no words today.” or “I cant’ make myself write about anything”
Sometimes it goes on like that for 1,000 words, and sometimes it turns into something worth doing something with….but you have to get the 900 words of awful to get to the 100 words of good. See the Hemingway quote I posted above.
My inner hater tells me I’m wasting my time and no one would want to read my stuff.